Online co-op is absolutely mandatory for me. I don't mind using Hamachi as a workaround, but if I'm forced to play exclusively with people physically near me, I sadly won't be buying this game. I've been following the development for months, and have shown the trailer on my stream a dozen times. But I feel a lack of online multiplayer (again, in one form or another - I'm willing to find creative workarounds) in a multiplayer game released in 2014 is just sad. I understand it may come later, but I honestly think that will be too late. Games that are focused exclusively on multiplayer have a hard time getting noticed as it is, and there's a big difference between being able to play a game like this on a stream with viewers around the world or with... nobody.

Again, devs I love your game, but you just don't release an exclusively multiplayer game without the ability to play online. I hope Hamachi will work, but I'm betting it won't.

calm down man its still only early access so it wont have it but they plan to. online multiplayer or not im getting this game

I'm quite calm, thanks. Typing more than one line and using proper grammar and punctuation doesn't mean I'm enraged. Let's keep the discussion on-topic, please.

Regardless of what your personal plans are for this game, myself and others who aren't physically located near the people we intend to play with will have no desire to purchase the game (not out of spite...) because I don't feel like playing a 2-4 player game by myself. I hope you can follow that logic.

calm down man its still only early access so it wont have it but they plan to. online multiplayer or not im getting this game

I'm quite calm, thanks. Typing more than one line and using proper grammar and punctuation doesn't mean I'm enraged. Let's keep the discussion on-topic, please.

Regardless of what your personal plans are for this game, myself and others who aren't physically located near the people we intend to play with will have no desire to purchase the game (not out of spite...) because I don't feel like playing a 2-4 player game by myself. I hope you can follow that logic.

I see where you are coming from but people with good internet will not be affected by this and if they use steam servers i think it would be fine

Thats the thing. I have an OK internet, but I live in Brazil and I don't expect many brazilians playing this game. This means I'll face lag everytime I'll play with someone at the US or Europe (probably the majority of players). Yet I must agree that they can't not implement online just because few players might face problems with lagging.This game claims for an online multiplayer.

the game we designed is all about local multiplayer- i grew up playing local multiplayer games and since online play became so big i started to miss laughing in a room with friends crowding in front of the tv- so i thought of crawl to fill the void! my goal was not to sell the most copies, just to remake that silly fun experience in a new way, and make a product i could be proud of and other people like me who missed local multiplayer could enjoy- i never even imagined online!

but, since we launched the greenlight, we have had loads of people requesting online support, because many people don't have easy access to people to play against in the same room- so i understand

online is not a perfect match for every game, and especially such a fast action game, introducing lag can be a huge probelm... so is online a good match for crawl?

it might be!

there is a good chance we will find that we can achieve the kind of fun we want even with some lag, but testing this out and then implementing it is a huge task- if we tried to do it before launch we would be pushing back launch by a lot of months, maybe up to a year?

so our first step is to release the game and refine it and get the gameplay just right- if it goes well and it looks like we have enough people really wanting online play, then we will look at that! but being a team of 2 people, we can't do too many things at once, so things might happen at a slower pace than people want!

all i can say is- i personally would love to add the feature, but we just don't know yet if we can pull it off!

the game we designed is all about local multiplayer- i grew up playing local multiplayer games and since online play became so big i started to miss laughing in a room with friends crowding in front of the tv- so i thought of crawl to fill the void! my goal was not to sell the most copies, just to remake that silly fun experience in a new way, and make a product i could be proud of and other people like me who missed local multiplayer could enjoy

I think a lot of gamers can relate to this =)

Now that Powerhoof replied we understand another problem (probably the biggest one) of adding online. Its just two developers, adding online will considerably delay the game launch. I speak for myself, but I can live with the delay (afterall, I'll have the early access to play with before the game releases).

But I think you guys should give a good thought about this before making a final decision.One guy (think his nick is Aziraya, or something like it) wrote a long post sharing his thoughts about online multiplayer. He said something like having online on launch would greatly increase the overall sales of Crawl. I admit I understand nothing about marketing and such, but the stuff he said made sense. Can't remember where I read his post. I'm hoping he'll pop up in this thread and explain his opinion here.

Anyway, I'll definitely buy Crawl. But I'm so hyped for this game, and I love indie devs so much that I whish you guys to be a huge sucess. Hard work deserves to be recognized. So, if in order to Crawl be a (greater) sucess you'll have to add online multiplayer and that means delaying the game launch. Well, maybe that's the right call. Just think it through before making the final decision, I'm sure you guys will do allright.

i grew up playing local multiplayer games and since online play became so big i started to miss laughing in a room with friends crowding in front of the tv-

I grew up playing local multiplayer as well, as we likely all did when we were kids. Partially because kids have a much more active social life, but mostly because the technology didn't exist in the 80s and 90s to play games online. I started off playing 2-player games on console because the technology didn't exist to have 4-player games. When 4-player games became the new standard (~N64 era), we all wanted to have 4 people playing at once. I didn't look back at 2-player games with a sense of nostalgia, but rather embraced the ability to have more people to play games with on a regular basis.

I think with indie games especially, there seems to be this unspoken rule that everything we did as kids was better because we get this warm, fuzzy feeling when thinking back to our childhood. But lately the market is over-saturated with retro graphics, remakes of old games, and just general "OMG 90s!" nostalgia. I understand that with small development teams it's nearly impossible to throw together a game that looks anything close to a Triple-A title, and I certainly don't expect a game like Crawl to have all of the features of $60 blockbuster games released by major studios. And I also understand that this is YOUR game, your priority is not making money, and I salute you for sticking to your guns and following through on your dream. But there are a great number of us (as evidenced by your Kickstarter goal being reached in what... one day?!) who would love to play the game, and restricting it to local multiplayer because it gives you a sense of nostalgia just seems... well, silly. Voice chat has been prevalent in the gaming community for over a decade, and internet speeds have greatly improved. But again, it's your game and you can do whatever you want with it. I'm not here to tell you what you should do with your game, but to share my perspective in case you had not fully considered it.

I wish you nothing but the best of luck with the game, and regardless of whether or not I personally pick it up I will certainly recommend it to other people who are in a position where they can play a local multiplayer game. I just simply wanted to communicate that the ability to play the game with other people who aren't in the same room as you is pretty much mandatory for anyone older than college/university-age. And I personally think that if you don't include this option UPON LAUNCH, it will be relegated to the giant pile of indie games that "look cool, but didn't quite make it." While that may be fine for you, a great number of us would be incredibly disappointed by that. I simply wanted to communicate that perspective.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go trash the entire house because I'm absolutely SHAKING with rage. You can tell because I typed more than one paragraph.

Thank you for what I can only assume is extremely genuine concern for my well-being, but as already stated I'd prefer to keep the discussion on-topic. If you'd like to have a discussion about my emotions, I'll happily have that conversation with you, just somewhere else. Thanks!